Maintenance page - hosted on LTM or redirect with fallback host - or both?

Hi,

 

 

I have something like this setup for our company. I ended up hosting the content on a seperate server mainly because I have to allow our Marketing team access so they can update the content and there was no way I was going to give them access to the BigIP. For me it was simpler and safer to have them use a IIS server with a share to the virtual server directory. That way they could alter the page to their hearts content without ever having to go near the BigIP. It also allowed them to go to the URL and test the page to make sure it worked as they wanted. All I had to do was to make sure the BigIP just used the alternate pool when the main pool active member count went below 1.

 

 

I also have a slight variation on this which allows our web team to automatically display a "Maintanence" page to external users by simply starting a IIS virtual website. Basically I have a pool which just contains the IIS server and the port the maintanence page runs on. By default this website is stopped and only started when they need the mainenance page up. So the iRule just checks the number of acive nodes on that pool and if it >0 then the iRule pools to that pool and volia the maintenance page is displayed. I use a datagroup/class of type IP as a conditional around the pool statement so connections orginating outside the company execute the code which pools to the maintanence pool. Nothing fantastic but it means they don't need to contact me when new rollouts/updates are being done which is good for them and me.

 

 

Craig